A snug internet fit into Yahoo mail
If the internet were the solar system, your inbox will certainly be the sun.
Every conceivable online product, be it videos on YouTube or slideshows on Flickr, will revolve around the inbox from now on.
At least that was what a user would experience if he/she were to have an email account with Yahoo.
The internet company that has nearly 600 million users across the globe (273 million of whom have signed up to its mail service), released the beta version of its Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger assuring that the new-look platform has been “transformed” from ground-up with clear emphasis on faster performance and greater integration of social networking, video/photo and gaming.
In a way, the integration of Twitter/Facebook (only the latter is available in India) has been on expected lines as Yahoo has been talking about integration of social networking platforms for quite sometime now. However, the fact that the user interface would remain the same across the PC, tablets and other mobile platforms (iPhones, iPads, all PCs and Android-based devices at this time) probably makes the new mail unique.
The company has adopted the back to basics approach in building the new platform, said company spokespersons recently. “Performance is not about having many features,” said Kakul Srivastava, Yahoo’s vice-president, Communications and Communities, product management. “We wanted this refresh to happen on the basis of performance, building a product which is lighter and faster. Frankly, the ‘feature war’ among mail products has made users suffer and so we decided to put the stress on performance,” she said.
The company had to work with all the teams —not just the mail team —to comprehensively improve performance, while also using modern mark-up techniques such as HTML5 to reduce images and make the look-and-feel prettier and elegant. “We have also used the latest cloud platform technology to better the performance,” said Michael Curtis, Vice-president, Engineering for Yahoo Mail.
“The ‘Edge Connection Server’, for instance, would let the user connect with the local proxy server instead of the mail bandwidth, which reduces latency greatly. We have also synchronised server and browser and have also used other techniques such as reducing redirects. As a result, the new Yahoo Mail is twice as fast as any mail product in the market today.”
The ability of users to sign into the new Yahoo Messenger from different devices allows continuity and access to archive. For instance, if the user ought to carry on with messaging on the IM from PC to mobile phone, he should be able to do it without cumbersome signing out and signing in as the platform can detect which of the devices is active and adjust itself to work from it.
Young users
“Several of the users today are youngsters and they prefer mobile phones for other traditional means of accessing things online. The new products have been created in anticipation of that.”
Also, it would be possible to work on the messenger and the text from the inbox itself. Users can also make postings to the FB page and organise their contacts through Yahoo mail. Letting users organise and prioritise their contacts depending on family, friends and closer acquaintances, Srivastava said, is one of the best features of the Beta version.
“We’ve done this leveraging our experience and understanding of how people use (social networking) products. They may have as many as 120 contacts, but what has been proved through recent studies is that they hardly connect with 12 of them. We identify who amongst their contacts they have reciprocal relationship with and help them build different circles around them,” she said.
By the look and feel of it at least, the new Yahoo mail and the messenger look very promising. Though the company is not sure about the date of its full release, they said it wouldn’t be before they are happy with the performance and safety aspects.
Not that safety would be a concern either, as the rate of spams — one of the most annoying of the issues in mails — is found to be much less in Yahoo Mail Beta than in its competitors Gmail and Hotmail.
